Month: November 2015

Recently I have been testing out Duplicity to set up backups for my personal server hosting this site. Duplicity is quite complex when you first start using it, but fortunately there are various tools and projects to help set it up. I have been using the excellent Stouts Backup ansible role, which installs duplicity along with Duply.

Tonight I noticed that the backups on my test Vagrant box, which had been working perfectly before, suddenly stopped working.

I was seeing the following error:

BackendException: No connection to backend

I found a blog post describing a similar problem, which suggested setting the AWS signature to version 4 in the duply configuration file.

Unfortunately, this didn’t help, but after some experimenting I noticed that s3cmd had also stopped working…

[root@dev vagrant]# s3cmd ls
ERROR: S3 error: 403 (RequestTimeTooSkewed): The difference between the request time and the current time is too large.

I then checked the date on my VagrantBox and noticed it was 2 days in the past…